The Last of Us Episode 3 Recap: The Biggest Game-Changer Yet

If you’ve been following The Last of Us TV show discourse online, you’ll know that episode 3 has been touted as the one to watch. Now we know why. Here’s a recap of The Last of Us episode 3, ‘Long Long Time’ and a guide to all its hidden easter eggs.

This article contains full spoilers for The Last of Us TV show. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can watch episodes 1-3 over on Binge now.

The Last of Us episode 3: Plot recap

We begin in a forest west of Boston. Joel (Pedro Pascal) is by the river, making a small shrine for his fallen partner, Tess.

Joel returns stonily to his companion, Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who reminds him that Tess’ death isn’t her fault. He and Tess were the ones who agreed to smuggle her, after all.

As they embark on their five-hour hike, Ellie pesters Joel with questions. Where are they going? Bill and Frank’s. How’d he get that scar? He was shot. Can she have a gun? Once again, no.

Joel stops off at one of their safehouses for supplies. At this point, if you were playing the video game, you’d be rummaging endlessly through drawers to find scraps of cloth or bottles of water. This has been translated into the show with a simple exchange:

Ellie: “You forgot where you put your stuff?”

Joel: “No, I’m just zeroing in on it.”

Ellie decides to take a look around herself and finds a hidden door to a basement. Inside, an infected man lies incapacitated under a pile of rubble. Ellie decides to get a closer look. She’s morbidly curious and cuts him with her switchblade to see how he reacts before mustering up the bloodlust to stab him through the eye.

Continuing their walk, Joel and Ellie come across the remains of a crashed aeroplane. Ellie thinks it’s the coolest thing in the world, while Joel tries to set realistic expectations of what being squished into a middle seat was like.

Ellie wants to know how the virus started, and Joel reveals the running theory is that cordyceps mutated and entered the food supply through something common like flour and sugar. This infected people with the fungus and, due to certain brands shipping worldwide, it was a global pandemic in a matter of days.

Joel then reveals what happened after the outbreak, saying soldiers gathered up everyone in small towns to take them to a Quarantine Zone. If there wasn’t room, they’d be killed en masse, even if they weren’t infected.

This explains the pile of skeletons Joel and Ellie just came across. Dead people can’t be infected.

We flashback to September 30, 2003, a few days after the outbreak.

One man hides in his basement and watches on a wall of security monitors as his neighbours are gathered up by soldiers. His bunker is stocked with ammunition and weapons.

Emerging later from his hideaway, the man removes his gas mask, revealing Bill (Nick Offerman).

Bill gets to work setting up his town. He’s resourceful, raiding the local stores for supplies that allow him to generate his own electricity, farm his own food and set up an explosive perimeter around his little neighbourhood. Nothing happens in Bill’s town without him knowing about it.

It’s a solitary existence for four years until Frank (Murray Bartlett) wanders into one of his traps.

Frank isn’t infected and says he’s just trying to reach Boston QZ. After confirming via a military scanner that Frank is clean, Bill is ready to send him on his way. But Frank convinces Bill to let him stay for a meal and a shower.

Over a hot roast meal – that is way too nice for this side of the apocalypse – Frank begins to chip away at Bill’s gruff exterior. After the duo take turns singing heartfelt renditions of Linda Ronstadt’s ‘Long Long Time’ on Bill’s antique piano, it’s game over.

We begin to chronicle Bill and Frank’s romance. Their relationship is the definition of finding love in a hopeless place.

It’s not always the easiest. Bill is all about survival. He’s paranoid about resource management. Frank is an idealist, clinging to the remnants of old society. He finds joy in the little things like painting a storefront or having friends over for dinner.

Those friends are none other than Tess (Anna Torv) and Joel, who join the couple for a meal after they connect over the radio. Tess and Frank get on like a house on fire. Meanwhile, Joel and Bill end up bonding over their mutual mistrust.

After Joel offers to smuggle things for them, Bill remains adamant they’re self-sufficient. Joel warns him it’s only a matter of time before raiders come.

Fast forward another few years, and we get a sweet scene where Frank surprises Bill with a strawberry patch he’s been secretly tending to.

“I was never afraid before you showed up,” Bill lovingly tells Frank. Cue the tears.

Then the night Joel warned of arrives. Raiders attack their town.

The traps fend off most of the raiders, but it still requires Bill to pick them off with a rifle to deter the rest. He takes a bullet to the gut in the process and begins running through his goodbyes, but Frank is determined to save him.

Next thing you know, it’s ten years later, and the couple is getting old. Frank is in a wheelchair, he struggles to hold a paintbrush aloft.

One morning, Frank decides it’s his last day. His illness is debilitating him to the point he just wants it over. Bill struggles to accept this, so Frank tells him to instead focus on giving him the best last day on Earth possible.

Franks says he wants to visit the boutique and dress up in fine garments. Then they’ll get married and have a nice dinner. After that, Bill will crush up all of Frank’s pills and mix them into his wine. Then he’ll drift off in Bill’s arms.

And that’s what happens.

When it comes to the wine part, Frank watches as Bill pours the wine and then puts the powdered pills into his glass. They toast and drain their glasses, and it’s then that Bill reveals he already put the mixture in the bottle, essentially dooming them both.

Frank was Bill’s purpose, he tells him, and they’ll go out of this life together.

When Joel and Ellie arrive at Frank and Bill’s, they find a note waiting for them. The note confirms the couple are dead, and they left the upstairs window open to eliminate the smell.

Bill reminds Joel in his note that men like him exist with a job to do – to save others. He bequeaths Joel everything, asking him to use it to protect Tess. This breaks Joel and he needs a moment outside.

Joel decides they’ll go and find his brother, Tommy, an ex-Firefly, who will help them find this lab that they were planning to take Ellie to. But before that can happen, Joel sets some ground rules: they are not to share their personal histories, Ellie is not to reveal her immunity to anyone and what he says goes.

Despite there being a wall of guns to choose from, Joel still won’t let Ellie handle one, so she sneaks one into her bag when he’s not looking. They then load up on supplies and drive Bill’s truck out of town.

The episode ends with a shot of Bill and Frank’s open window.

Easter eggs

The Last of Us episode 3 may have been a big departure from what happens in the game, but it still contains plenty of easter eggs for fans.

• In the game, things play out very differently in Bill’s town. Joel and Ellie come to Bill looking for a car. Bill is still depicted as a jaded and paranoid survivor, but he and Ellie have a fiery rapport. Together the group fight off hordes of infected to retrieve a car battery, and even come in contact with the game’s first boss fight (a bloater). None of this is shown in the episode, but it still achieves the same end goal with Joel and Ellie acquiring a car.
• In the game, Frank is simply referred to as Bill’s “partner”. Only his dead body is ever seen in the game, but the series expands on this and gives his character a full journey, while also confirming the two were, in fact, a couple.
• Ellie points out a Mortal Kombat II arcade combat and comments she had a friend who knew everything about the game. This is a reference to her friend Riley, who appears in The Last of Us: Left Behind DLC.
• Fun fact, the aeroplane rubble that Ellie and Joel come across is a new moment in the series and was also one of the first production images ever released to promote the TV show.
• When Joel explains the outbreak to Ellie, he talks about the fungus spreading in things like bread, cereal and pancake mix. The pancake mix is a clear reference to his daughter Sarah, who wanted to make him pancakes on his birthday in episode 1.
• When Joel and Ellie change clothes at Bill and Frank’s house, Ellie puts on a faded red coconut shirt, which is the same outfit she wears in a large chunk of the game.
• Easily the biggest easter egg from this episode is the final shot of the window. In the video game, the opening menu screen depicts a broken window. In the show, this image is recreated and reveals that it belongs to Bill and Frank’s bedroom.

The Last of Us episode 3: Verdict

The third episode of The Last of Us is the largest departure from the source material yet, but it is an example of how that can actually work out for the better.

Instead of spending an hour dealing with a town crawling with infected like in the game, ‘Long Long Time’ provides us with a beautiful window into the lives of two characters whose relationship was previously given very little attention.

This is a stand-out episode for not just The Last of Us, but television in general, and reminds us that there is still light to be found amongst the darkness.

Read our weekly recaps: Episode 1 | Episode 2

Stream The Last of Us on Binge.